Your first proper road bike?

[Syd]

I had numerous bikes as a kid then work and family took over before I finally found time to buy, and use, my first proper road bike.

It was a 1985 Peugeot bike I bought second hand.




What was your first proper road bike?

[millimole]

I built oneup from scratch on a random frame I'd been given - I know it had Cyclo Benelux gearing! It got stolen from school.
A mate of my dad's at his work offered me his Hetchins (with - yuk - hub gears) for a fiver.
I toured on it round England, Wales and France - and I've still got it almost exactly 50 years later!

[Syd]

Wow. I wish I still had my Peugeot after all this time.

Do you still ride it the occasional time?

[gbnz]

Peugeot, can remember desiring one back in the 80's.

But? Giant OCR in 2002. Total rebuild over Christmas in 2012, new Shimano wheels, the lot. Then never used it again. Until Sunday, when a deep clean/strip down of the Spa and another Giant flat bar bike, "forced" it's use.

It was incredible, I routinely pass "roadies" in lycra whilst on the Spa Tourer. But the Giant OCR? The acceleration possible, the speed, throwing it around the corners on the open road, overtaking the cars as they trundled along. I'd forgotten what an incredible experience a road bike is. Two days and I may partially revert to being a roadie!

[foxyrider]

My first drop handlebar bike, to call it a road bike would be stretching things, was a 5sp Falcon, 27" wheels, gas pipe tubing, plastic saddle, basic Huret gear mech and bendy Weinmann caliper brakes, a 13th birthday present in 1976! It got upgraded to 10sp and a few donated bits and removal of the awful decals made it at least look a bit more 'proper'.

It was replaced by a plain gauge REW Reynolds of Northampton bespoke frame, proper dropouts and typical set of '70's bosses in sky blue, price £24.95 plus a fiver for a Stronglight headset to be fitted. My racing career started properly on that, I sold it in 1979 for £40 having acquired my Owen Blower in 1978, which 40 odd years later, is my Eroica machine, built up not identical but pretty close to how it was for the 1979/80 racing campaigns.

No pics of the first 2 but here's the Blower, everything looks so skinny! At the time it was new it was as good as it gets but i have to admit that my CF Peugeot is actually more comfortable, has better acceleration and weighs 3kg less! (it also cost a hell of a lot more)

[ANTONISH]

1958 - A.E. Boult.
Cyclo 5sp gears, HP rims. Soon replaced with campag 10sp (5x2) and Fiamme sprints.

[Oldjohnw]

When I first got a bike in the 1950s it wasn’t about a road bike: it was just a bike.

I got my then recently deceased grandad’s bike. I have no idea what it was except that it was quite new and had three sturmey archer gears. He had used it for work - he was a labourer at Workington Steel works. He was a very small man and I was quite a tall child.

My first serious bike in the mid/late 1960s was a second hand hand built JRJ (Bob Jackson) bought from a professional cyclist.

It was stolen and it’s loss still breaks my heart.

[Grandad]

Second hand semi drop bars BSA, bought in 1950 from East Lane in Camberwell for £3. Rode it to Waterloo station for the train home, successfully negotiating my first experience of tramlines.

Progressed to something better , when the frame broke grandmother lent me the £9 17s 6p to buy a Claud Butler frame which I collected from the factory in Clapham.

Some years later I bought another London made frame - Dan Genner in Colliers Wood

[tatanab]

What is a "road bike". I started riding in the 1960s, and certainly up until about 2000 a road bike was a bike for riding road races, or doing double duty for time trials as well. The modern definition seems to be that a road bike is almost anything with drop bars and no mudguards, but that definition is set by marketeers not riders.

Like foxyrider, the bike that I started club riding on was a gas plumbers Claud Butler with 5 Simplex in 1967 (aged 15). Of course I had mudguards and saddlebag etc, so would that be a road bike under modern definitions? As I remember, the bike cost me £27 which was a deposit of £9 and 10 shillings a week on hire purchase for a year . After that I assembled many machines using secondhand parts to gradually climb the ladder to 531DB and cotterless cranks. I have not had an off the peg machine since that Claud Butler, but even that was assembled from parts by my LBS.

The first bike on which I rode road races (1980, 10 years after starting timetrials) was a 531SL Dan Shotton frame, probably equipped with Campag Tipo hubbed sprints, TA chainset and Universal sidepulls.

[peetee]

My first bike was when I was at the age of eighteen; a Viscount Tony Doyle, handed down by my brother. More a sports bike with drop bars it served me well before I splashed out the princely sum of fifty pounds for a Japanese Hirami frame which, I was soon to realise, was more gas pipe than the Viscount.
My first educated and considered purchase was a Holdsworth Triath-Elan kitted out with a Campagnolo Triomphe groupset which was a huge improvement and did me well for thousands of happy miles.

[pq]

Mine was a very second hand Bob Jackson. It should have been OK but unfortunately was the most appalling crate which I was glad to see the back of. Took 2 years to save up for a replacement though.

[TrevA]

Mine was a Carlton Ten - 531 frame and a Brooks saddle, Weinmann centre pull brakes, death trap chrome rims (brakes didn’t work in the wet), these were soon swapped out for some Alu rims, Steel cottered chainset, Huret rear mech. Cost my dad £42 from Bunneys Bikes in Nottingham in 1974. This quickly became my winter bike and my first proper racing bike was an Orange and Blue Holdsworth Professional from Henry Lloyds in Netherfield, Nottingham.

[keyboardmonkey]

After various bikes and a couple of tourers I got my first 'racer' in 1986. My Raleigh Road Ace:

Reynolds 531 Competition tubing and mostly a full Shimano 600 groupset including the pedals and headset, but excluding the Dura Ace handlebars and some fluted seat pin. (I've kept a newish plain 'Kalloy' seat pin in place ever since I lent the bike to a much taller bloke.)

The bike came with the then standard 52/42 chainset and 13-21 six-speed Uniglide cassette. I've recently fitted a 14-28 (!) set of sprockets from my stash and I see from Strava that I last rode the bike in September 2020. I really must get out on it again now I have some 23mm tan wall tyres.

[kylecycler]

Mine was a Carlton Ten - 531 frame and a Brooks saddle, Weinmann centre pull brakes, death trap chrome rims (brakes didn’t work in the wet), these were soon swapped out for some Alu rims, Steel cottered chainset, Huret rear mech. Cost my dad £42 from Bunneys Bikes in Nottingham in 1974. This quickly became my winter bike and my first proper racing bike was an Orange and Blue Holdsworth Professional from Henry Lloyds in Netherfield, Nottingham.

Mine too, Trev - Carlton Ten - exactly like that! I don't remember how the brakes worked in the wet - tbh I don't even remember riding it in the wet - so I never got as far as swapping the rims/wheels out. It was quite heavy but you could build the bike up nowadays around the frame using alloy rimmed wheels, space it to 126 mm and fit a 6 speed freewheel with Shimano indexed downtube shifters, a Spa double chainset, etc, and it would be a nice bike to ride. The frame was identical to the Raleigh Super Course - 531 main triangle - although the fork and rear triangle were hi ten. I think mine came with that weird Raleigh front hub where the shoulders of the cones fit into the dropouts and only one cone is adjustable (you had to spring the fork when fitting the wheel) so I'll need to figure out what to do about that when I build mine back up (I've still got (just) the frame and fork).

My Carlton Ten's sole purpose in life, at least until I eventually build it up again, was to ride to Le Mans in 1977, to the 24 Hours motor race. I'd been twice before, in '74 and '76, on coach tours, but Le Mans is a long circuit - over 8 miles - and it was hard to get to the far side even within the 24 hours - you can't walk around a lot of the circuit, you have to follow local back roads, so even though I walked to Arnage corner and back in '76, I never got round to Mulsanne corner on the far side of the circuit, which seemed silly after going all that way. I didn't have a car so I figured the best way to get around the circuit would be by bicycle. I'd actually given up on going that year until I had the idea, so it was within a month of the race before I even looked for a bike. I worked in the Parks and Recreation department as a gardener so I was relatively fit, but not for cycling (we all know that's a different thing), and I hadn't ridden a bike since my last bike was stolen at the school about four years previous, although I'd never been off bikes up until then.

I bought the Carlton from Harry Fairbairn's bike shop in Ayr, which is now the motorcycle shop, and by the time I'd kitted it out with a rack and panniers (Karrimor panniers and bar bag, green with red piping to match the bike), a tent, sleeping bag, etc., I only had time to 'shake it down' around the neighbourhood before I took it on the train via London to Newhaven, then to Dieppe (the closest port to Le Mans) on the ferry, then I cycled to Le Mans (southwest of Paris) and vice versa on the way back (with considerable difficulty, all things considered, but I made it!).

Anyway, the idea worked as far as it went but the poor Carlton, even though it was my absolute pride and joy, and that trip still means more to me than just about anything else I've done in my life, was left to waste away in a damp garage - I'd got a car soon after (worst thing I ever did!). At some point in the '80s or '90s I stripped it of its components - all the chrome had rusted - but saved the frame and fork, which still has hardly any rust inside or out. Unfortunately I threw away the headset which I've since discovered was 26 tpi - Raleigh threading (although the BB is 24 tpi, same arrangement as with almost all Super Courses too, apparently) - but a couple of years ago I sourced NOS Raleigh 26 tpi headsets for sale from Yellow Jersey bike shop in Wisconsin - they cater for a lot of stuff like that - and bought one, so the restoration project was back on, although it still hasn't started yet. I've got it all worked out, though (took a while!) so no doubt I'll be posting on here for advice when I eventually get on with it.

[eileithyia]

I started touring on bf's spare bike, a local frame builder; Pollard. This meant I both had the time to know I was a, going to continue cycling, b, could do my research and look around for a bike, c, finish college and start work thus having the money to buy a touring bike.
I settled on the Dawes Super Galaxy, in Gold Mink with brown handlebar tape and lug lining. Sadly someone drove into the back of it a few years later.